ActivityPub for GNU Social GSoC

Congrats to Diogo Cordeiro on getting a GSoC internship this summer to add ActivityPub to GNU Social! And thanks to GNU Social maintainer mmn-o for mentoring!

GNU Social is a social communication software used in federated social networks. In a federated social network user data stays in user's server instead of a centralized one. Given that, standards were created in order to make the communication between different softwares in a social federated context possible. ActivityPub is the newer and covers parts out of OStatus's specification, namely the app/client development. Because of this and other benefits, GNU Social is looking forward to support this new protocol. The project idea aims at developing a plugin (as GNU Social is true to the Unix-philosophy of small programs to do a small job) that will implement the ActivityPub Protocol in GNU Social.

And a merry *********** too...

I took my last call of filing season on Friday evening just before 5:18 PM when we get to sign off.

My tour of duty doesn't include Mondays. I offered to do overtime Monday to help with workload but I'm not needed.

On Tuesday, the principal filing deadline, I am off-duty as a I have a medical appointment in Conneaut.

I finished the filing season by taking calls on essentially "punishment duty". There are 5 days for "perfection" of rejected e-filed tax returns starting after the deadline on April 17th for people to fix things if their last minute e-files are screwed up. I'll be back on a normal gate on the phone system by then.

Cardiac issues were starting to develop slightly. Fluid retention in my hands and feet were causing them to swell up pretty badly. My blood pressure one day after getting home was 130 over 85 after being home for 3 hours since work ended. This will be talked about Tuesday.

Surprisingly there was not an exchange of thermonuclear warheads Friday night. If you don't know what I'm referring to then be glad. You don't want to know.

Let's do a little experiment. It's obviously biased by my relative participation in each, but I'm comparing the reach of twitter, facebook, Diaspora, pump, G+, and GNU Social (plus anything that can talk directly to it...that is not via NavierStokes).

Please like this if you see it. Obviously, if you want more people to like it, then you share it, but I'm only going to count likes.

What's interesting is that on Diaspora, pump, and GNU Social, I all got actual comments about how the study was being conducted. I got literally zero comments on twitter or G+. There's all sorts of bias in this, but I have more "friends" on facebook by an order of magnitude and significantly more on twitter than the free platforms. So, it seems like people join the proprietary networks and just don't use them very much.

Less Than 7 Days To Go

I'm on the bloody SWITCHBOARD gate on the phone system at work for the rest of the week. What does that entail? Basically this:

"Hello, thank you for calling the Internal Revenue Service, my name is Mr. Kellat, my badge number is [REDACTED], how may I direct your call?"

8 hours per day for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I may not answer questions. I must triage what you want and then transfer you away.

Normally this is the "punishment gate".

Call volume is actually down pretty hard. Receipts of paper documents are down pretty hard too. I'm still in "seasonal" status which means my staying in paid status depends upon there being sufficient workload to justify my being in paid status. We took an entire campus off the air today which is extremely unusual for what should be the absolute peak for phone calls. If we take more campuses off the air tomorrow the possibility of furlough may advance forward earlier than the end of June.

The House Ways and Means Committee will be doing a markup Wednesday on a restructuring bill for work. What could go wrong....

Some people reading this qualify (don't doubt it) and might be interested in the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship ($50k, due March 24) more at basselkhartabil.org -- it's written broadly and perhaps a bit vaguely but I bet e.g., working on bringing decentralization to the people by writing free software would be a good fit.

I've had problems with coffee for quite a few years. When I'm drinking it regularly, I increase my intake gradually: an extra cup in the morning. A cup in the afternoon. One after dinner. A full thermos on my desk all day.
As I drink more, I sleep less at night, I feel less, and worst of all, I get snappy and irritable with friends and family.
So I periodically go cold turkey. I'll typically switch to green tea, which has much lower levels of caffeine. I'll generally get a better outlook, sleep better, and feel better.
Except I love coffee. So then I reintroduce coffee slowly as a treat, then every day, then it gradually creeps into chain-drinking, and I'm back where I started.
I've recently hit on a formula that seems to work, wherein I can drink all the coffee I want before noon, and no coffee at all afterwards. I have noticed that my mood stays stable, I sleep well, but I still get to enjoy my cup.
The problem with rules like this is the edge cases. Like, what if I have a cup of coffee in hand as the clock strikes 12? What should I do with it? I've been giving myself the benefit of the doubt and made the deal that coffee that was poured in a cup before noon can be finished.
A couple of days ago, I made myself a French press at 11:35. I filled up my large Thermos cup, and there was still enough in the pot to fill up another porcelain cup. All poured before noon, all fair to drink as long as I wanted.
I didn't finish the Thermos cup until 4:30PM. I was up from midnight to 3:30am that night. Damn.
So, lesson learned. No coffee after noon, period. Anything still in the cup goes down the drain.

I'm not claiming I did any work on AP implementation in Mastodon of course, that's thanks to a herculean effort on Gargron and friends. But standards stuff unexpectedly occupied 2.5 hard years of my and others' life; sometimes I laid in bed wondering if it was worth it. Feels like it was now, and I'm grateful for that.

I like your story about the photobooth software. I think it has aspects that can be discussed and further expanded during an interview that should get at things people are interested in.

[I almost deleted what I wrote below because it reads negative. I don't mean to be negative. Try to read it with a matter-of-fact voice.]

I'm in a similar boat to you. I can't show other people any of the projects I've ever worked on. On top of that, I struggle with "pride". It's not that I don't "take pride" in my work, in that I try to achieve the highest quality possible. I do that. However, I am not proud of any of the things I've worked on. The resulting objects are not things that I think are valuable, so there's nothing there for me to be proud of. I created them (or helped create them). They exist. But that's it. Apparently other people have found the objects valuable, but I never have. It's difficult to find an exemplar using an emotion I am not experiencing.

Anyway, when faced with a question like that, I have one particular professional experience that I can talk about in specific terms. It's not even a project. It's just an aspect of a project, but at least it is something I can talk about in detail with some enthusiasm that hopefully satisfies the interviewer.

An aspect of this problem is that when I'm not working, I struggle to do things related to engineering and development. I tend to spend my time on family, friends, chores, and, if I have time left, other hobbies unrelated to my profession. If I don't do the "other hobbies", I tend towards feeling burned out. So there's very little spare bandwidth for developing a portfolio away from my professional work. (I know. I know! I'm just not passionate enough.) I use that very little spare bandwidth for staying abreast of the industry or learning things that interest me since I've never worked anyplace that wants to invest in my continuing education. However, that learning doesn't generally result in anything significant that I can show people unless it gets used... at work. And so it continues...

I am creating a replica of the DEC PDP-8/e architecture in an FPGA from schematics of the original hardware. So how did I end up with a project like this?The story begins with me wanting to have a computer with one of those front panels that have many, many lights where you can really see, in real time, what the computer is doing while it is executing code. Not because I am nostalgic for a prior experience with any of those — I was born a bit too late for that and my first computer as a kid was a Commodore 64.